Voucher website crashes as 26,000 scramble to register in first hour

THE website of the Northern Territory’s highly popular $200 tourism voucher melted down overnight as more than 26,000 scrambled to register in the first hour

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THE website of the Northern Territory’s highly popular $200 tourism voucher melted down on Monday night as thousands of people scrambled to register.

There were 26,700 unique visitors to the voucher website within the first hour of registrations going live at 8pm on Monday causing the site to crash almost immediately.

A message on the site said: “Hold tight … we’ll be right back. We’re sorry, the Territory Tourism Voucher website is currently experiencing high demand. We’re working on it, so please check back soon.”

The website was still down four hours later for the majority of users, and all of the available 12,000 vouchers had already been allocated by 4.38am on Tuesday.

Tourism NT executive general manager marketing Tony Quarmby said the amount of traffic on the website on Monday night was almost ten times what they saw during round one in July.

“This level of traffic to the website caused extended wait times for people registering,” he said.

“Technicians are still investigating further.”

In total there were 71,481 unique views to the website from 8pm when registrations went live until 6am the next day.

At the busiest point recorded, there were at least 8,256 people on the website at one time.

The voucher website had ‘caching’ enabled, which meant that traffic from popular sources, like the link on Chief Minister Michael Gunner’s Facebook post, were served faster.

The vouchers are worth up to $200, matched dollar for dollar with personal spend, and can be put towards a tourism experience like tours, accommodation, hire cars or recreational fishing charters.

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This round Territorians also have to option of applying for an additional bonus claim, which is a reimbursement of up to $200 based on a dollar for dollar investment when the product you book is more than 400km from your permanent residence.

Successful registrations should receive their voucher code within seven days.